Selling Spontaneity

You may associate spontaneity with jazz or comic improv. But the direct, all-embracing experience that spontaneity promises has been deployed to sell blue jeans, one of America’s gifts to popular culture.

Jeans were born as long-wearing workpants. J. W. Davis, inventor of the five-pocket, riveted blue jeans, sold them at his dry goods store in Reno, Nevada. They were meant for the mining community (note the pickax in the patent application). Unable to afford the patent office fee, Davis approached Levi Strauss, his denim cloth wholesaler in San Francisco. In return for half interest, Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant born in Bavaria, funded the patent. Improved by human artifice — rivets — the original jeans were anything but natural.